An important part of these ceremonies is a mention of how much the couple intends to communalize their financial resources. Marriage used to mean an automatic blending of all financial resources, but that is no longer the case. Couples may now choose among many different options. The couple's intentions regarding finances should be announced to family and friends. It is my firm belief that the more the extended families and friends know about what kind of marriage the couple is trying to create, the more they can serve as support people in that process. The financial agreements should also be delineated in a pre-nuptial agreement (see page 10 for a discussion of prenups.)

Lastly, I do want to mention that you may well run into some social pressure when you announce to your families and friends that you do not intend to have a traditional wedding ceremony. I say this from personal experience. Our society is still very attached to the traditional “till death do us part” type of ceremony, and if you decide to have an alternative ceremony that refuses to reflect that kind of philosophy, you will encounter resistance. When I first told people that my fiancé and I were going to discuss the possibility of divorce in our marriage ceremony, they thought I was crazy: "How can you talk about divorce at a wedding ceremony without ruining the whole thing?" We persevered, never-the-less, and even those friends who were skeptical admitted to me afterwards that the ceremony was quite poetic and beautiful despite its lack of "till death do us part" proclamations of love. I remember one particularly skeptical friend saying to me after my ceremony:

“Mumm, I am shocked-- you actually pulled it off! I can’t believe I just sat through a wedding ceremony that talked about divorce and it actually sounded kind of normal to do that. It was a very nice ceremony.”

My husband and I stuck to our convictions that our love was no less wonderful or deep than most other peoples' who were flocking to the alter; we were simply more realistic about the whole thing. Perhaps because we were both over thirty-five and had seen a lot of divorces, or maybe because we were just more rational and logical than most people, we simply did not want to use words like forever in our ceremony. Of course we hoped our marriage would last a lifetime, but we did not want to promise that to one another because we both recognized that it was not something that could be predicted. We were not willing to stand up and make the same kind of “love one another till death do us part” promise that we had seen so many others promise and break. So we tackled the task of how to design a marriage ritual and celebration that was a reflection of our philosophies about marriage and not anybody else's!

We also did a lot of thinking about how much money we wanted to spend on our wedding. We concluded we did not believe in having a really expensive wedding. That decision had more to it than just the money. It had do with asking the question “How appropriate is it to have a very expensive, and grandiose wedding? We concluded it is not appropriate because it helps creates the illusion that marriage is a fait accompli. For those of you who do not know this French phrase, it means something already done, a foregone conclusion, a feat accomplished. Marriage is no longer necessarily a once in a lifetime event. It therefore really makes a lot more sense to save some of that wedding money and grandiosity for a twenty-five ear anniversary party! A twentyfive year marriage is indeed a fait accpompli, worthy of great hoopla. I certainly do not recommend slinking off to City Hall to be married with strangers as witness as if there should not be any celebration in the act of getting married. But these is a lot of healthy middle ground between no celebration, and a huge, expensive, grandiose wedding. It’s all about moderation. In summary, I offer these ceremonies as “food for thought.” I encourage people to use the ideas presented to design their own, unique wedding ceremony. On the following pages you will find a wedding ceremony for couples intending to have children and one for those who do not intend to become parents. There is also a lesbian wedding ceremony, a wedding ceremony for gay men and a ceremony for a senior couple. You are obviously free to mix and match parts from any of them.